Collaborative Climate Community Data and Processing Grid (C3Grid)

For the last decades the amount of data has increased enormously in the earth system sciences. On the one hand, due to rapid rise in computing power scientists are now able to use models with higher resolution, to perform long term simulations and to couple several components in complex cumulative simulations producing petabytes of output. On the other hand, the monitoring of earth with satellites results in a second huge data stream for earth system science. The data are stored in distributed archives. Up to now, no uniform access to these data is available. The project "Collaborative Climate Community Data and Processing Grid" (C3Grid) proposes to link distributed data archives in several German institutions. With the help of grid technologies we will build up an infrastructure for the scientists in climate research which provides tools for effective data discovery, data transfer and processing.